It is not necessary to believe in Gramsci’s political utopia—designed to justify his work as an intellectual in a workers’ party—to appreciate his theoretical achievement in analyzing the intellectual function that characterizes the modern state. Unlike the powers that ruled agrarian societies, modernization and the division of labor required that the political apparatus perform diverse, ever-multiplying intellectual functions. While the majority of the populace remained illiterate, this apparatus expanded and cultivated within it the bulk of the literate population.
Which social classes produced these first “intellectuals” in the growing state bureaucracy? The answer might help solve the question of the historical differences in the formation of civil and ethnic nationalisms. In Britain, after the Puritan revolution, the state apparatus was staffed by members of the new minor aristocracy and commercial bourgeoisie. In the United States the staff came mainly from wealthy farming families and prosperous city dwellers. In France it was mainly educated members of the commercial class and the petty bourgeoisie who filled the ranks of the “gown nobility,” while the upheavals of the Revolution continued to inject new social elements into the body politic.
In Germany, on the other hand, the Prussian imperial state system was made up principally of conservative members of the Junker class, their offspring, and their associates, and things did not immediately change when Prussia became part of the German Reich after 1871. In Russia, too, the Tsarist state drew its public servants from the traditional nobility. In Poland, the first social class that aspired and struggled for a national state were the aristocrats. Without revolutions to introduce educated, dynamic elements and members of the new mobile classes, the early stages of state formation did not include intellectuals who were commoners in the political game or, therefore, in the dominant protonational ideologies.
The French thinker Raymond Aron wondered whether racism is not, among other things, the snobbery of the poor.52 This observation not only diagnoses a familiar mental state of the modern mass; it can also point to the historical sources of the concept of “blood ties,” which dictated the boundaries of certain national groups. Before the modern age it was the nobility that marked blood as the measure of kinship.53 Only the aristocrats had blue blood in their veins, which they inherited from their precious ancestral seed. In the old agrarian world, biological determinism as the criterion for human classification was perhaps the most important symbolic possession of the ruling classes. It was the basis of the legal customs that served as the infrastructure of its prolonged, stable power over the land and the realm. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his time, upward mobility during the Middle Ages was possible only in the church: it was the only system not based exclusively on genealogy and was thus the source of modern egalitarianism.54
The dominant presence of members and associates of the declining nobility among the new intellectuals in the government systems of Central and Eastern Europe apparently affected the direction of the future national identities that were then developing. When the Napoleonic wars forced the kingdoms east of France to don national costumes, their loyal and conservative literate circles sowed the ideological seeds that exchanged the horizontal concept of blue blood for a vertical one, and the reversal of aristocratic identity initiated the hesitant beginnings of a protonational identity. This identity, assisted by later intellectuals, soon led to the ideological and legal principle defining the membership of the “ethnic” nationality as blood-based (jus sanguinis). The national membership granted in the West on grounds of birth in the territory (jus soli) was entirely absent in the nation-states of Eastern Europe.
Yet here, too, the Italian example flies in the face of overconfident schematization. Why did civil-political nationalism succeed here at such an early stage? Surely the first intellectuals of the state apparatus throughout the future Italy also derived from the traditional aristocracy? A possible, if inadequate, explanation for the relative restraint of ethnicism in the consolidation of Italian identity could be the tremendous weight of the papacy and the Catholic universalism that it imbued in all the strata from which the Italian bureaucracy arose. Perhaps also the clearly political myth of the ancient Roman republic and empire helped immunize this unusual civil identity; moreover, the marked differences between northern and southern Italians could have prevented a dubious ethnic nationalism.
Or we may ditch all of Gramsci’s analyses and choose a firmer basis on which to clarify the role of the intellectuals in national modernization. We can limit the term “intellectuals” to the producers, organizers and propagators of culture in the modern state and its extensions in civil society. With this approach, it will still be possible to discover how indispensable they were for the consolidation of nationalism and the formation of nation-states.
As Anderson pointed out, one of the major developments leading up to the age of nationalism was the printing revolution that began in Western Europe at the end of the fifteenth century. This technocultural revolution weakened the status of the sacred languages and helped spread the languages of state administration that would eventually become national languages. The position of the clergy, whose use of the sacred languages was their main symbolic possession, declined. The clerics, who had attained their status and even earned their living thanks to their bilingualism, lost their historical role and were forced to seek other sources of income.55
The symbolic properties inherent in the national languages offered an expanding market of fresh opportunities. Flourishing book production required new specializations and new intellectual endeavors. Philosophers, scientists, and, before long, writers and poets abandoned Latin and turned to French, English, German and other vernaculars. The next stage, the rise of journalism, would hugely increase the number of readers, and thus the corps of writers catering to the public. But the real catalyst of national language and culture was the state, whose nature kept evolving. To promote production and compete with other national economies, the state apparatus had to take on the task of educating the populace and turn it into a national enterprise.
Universal education and the creation of agreed cultural codes were preconditions for the complex specializations demanded by the modern division of labor. Therefore every state that became “nationalized,” whether authoritarian or liberal, made elementary education a universal right. No mature nation failed to declare education compulsory, obliging its citizens to send their children off to school. This institution, which became the central agent of ideology—rivaled only by the military and by war—turned all subjects into citizens, namely, people conscious of their nationality.56 If Joseph de Maistre maintained that the executioner was the mainstay of social order in the state, Gellner’s provocative insight was that the decisive role in the state belonged to none other than the educator.57 More than to their rulers, the new national citizens became loyal to their culture.
Yet Gellner’s argument that this has turned the modern state into a community made up entirely of priests/scribes is imprecise.58 Though literacy has become universal, there is a new division of labor in the nation—between those who create and disseminate literacy and make their living doing so, and those who consume its products and make use of it. From the elected minister of culture through the university scholar and lecturer to the schoolteacher, a hierarchy of intellectuals serves the state, filling the roles of director and playwright, and even leading actors in the immense cultural spectacle called the nation. Agents of culture from